Vera Scarves and Textiles

The simple moniker “Vera,” marked on colorful, graphic, mid-century textiles, was the signature label of artist Vera Neumann. After attending art school at the Cooper Union and the Traphagen School of Design in New York City, Vera Neumann (born Vera Salaff) worked as a fashion illustrator and textile designer. In 1946, she began designing textiles for Printex, a company she founded with her husband, George Neumann, and their partner Werner Hamm. In the beginning, the Neumanns worked out of their Manhattan apartment, using a silkscreen machine to print designs onto linen fabric, which Vera sewed into placemats. Hamm quickly sold three Printex designs to the luxury department store B. Altman and Company. From there, demand for Neumann’s designs took off. The company adopted the “Vera” trademark in 1947, and the following year, the Neumanns moved their studio to an old mansion converted to a silkscreening factory in Ossining, New York, where every part of the company’s production was executed. Following the end of World War II, military-surplus silk was cheaply available, so in its early days, the company focused on silk scarves. By the mid-1950s, the Neumanns had a team of employees working to translate Vera’s original designs—printed onto 36” square scarves—into other formats. Vera had quickly become a household name, particularly after celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and First Lady Bess Truman were spotted with her products. Each design began as an original painting by Vera, who believed in the Bauhaus design principle that fine art should be accessible to everyone. Many of Vera’s paintings were made with a sumi brush, a style favored by Japanese watercolor artists, and featured colorful florals, geometric abstractions, playful still-lives, and bright landscapes or city scenes. This imagery was then printed onto a wide variety of housewares including aprons, coasters, napkins, potholders, pottery, placemats, bed linens, curtains, and draperies. The Neumanns also ran in a social circle including other accomplished modern artists like Alexander Calder and Marcel Breuer, who designed the couple’s home in the Hudson River Valley, which was completed in 1953, as well as the company’s factory and showrooms. George Neumann died in 1960, but Vera continued to grow the brand they had built together. She added clothing to the Printex line in the 1960s, beginning with blouses and dresses made from cotton and silk, and added a small ladybug into the Vera logo. At this point, the company’s textile printing was done in Japan, where up to 300 different designs were produced in a single year. In 1972, Vera became the first artist featured at the Smithsonian’s Resident Associate Program, painting a bright rendition of the museum’s famous Foucault Pendulum. Throughout the 1970s, Vera also exhibited her original work in spaces like the Emile Walter Gallery and the Fashion Institute of Technology, both in New York City. Meanwhile, Vera had hired Perry Ellis as a merchandise manager in the mid-1970s—Ellis was eventually promoted to designer. Ellis launched “Portfolio by Perry Ellis for Vera” in 1976, three years before leaving to start his own company. Vera’s work was eventually acquired for the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). “Glamour takes a back seat in the fashions designed by Vera, whose collections reflect the wild things that breathe, eat, grow and create—flowers, leaves, ferns, grass, and always the sun,” Sharon Cheswick wrote in a profile of Vera for the "New York Times" in 1977. By that time, Vera’s products were in more than 1,200 stores, generating more than $100 million in yearly sales. Vera continued to paint through the final months of her life in 1993. Today, her trademarked products are still produced by the Vera Company in Atlanta, Georgia, which owns the Vera license and its original designs.